Clippy for ReSharper

ReSharper has always wanted to make you more productive with your code. We already provide great tools for navigation and code completion, refactoring, inspections and running unit tests.

But how can we improve on what we’ve got?

How can we really help you, our customer, develop great solutions for your customers?

With Office 2003 hitting end of support, the answer was obvious – a much loved icon was also being retired.

We’ve offered him a job.

That’s right, Clippy is coming to ReSharper. And this isn’t just an announcement – you can download and install him right now, from the Extension Gallery (in Visual Studio, select ReSharper –> Extension Manager –> Online, search for “clippy”). Clippy supports ReSharper 8.1 and the recently released 8.2 (which is a free upgrade – grab it now!)

In the same way that he has provided help to millions of customers of the phenomenally successful Office suite, he can now live out his retirement helping developers produce the best code they possibly can, as quickly as they can.

He’ll help you navigate, he’ll help you refactor, he’ll help you generate code:

He’ll even help you run your tests!

Once you’ve installed the extension, there’s nothing more you need to do. Just open a solution, start working and Clippy will appear, ready and willing to help.

Yes, Links is a good one. You should be fine swapping the .acs file – the various animation names are hard coded, but they were both assistants for Office, so should support the same things. Of course, the extension is open source, if you’d like to implement the character chooser

It’s actually using DoubleAgent, an open source clone of the Agent API (http://doubleagent.sourceforge.net/). You should be able to swap in any agent character, as long as it implements the same animation names that Clippy does.

There are no plans for further development (it’s a joke, after all!), however, it is Open Source – if you’re interested in adding features, and sending pull requests, you can find it here: https://github.com/citizenmatt/resharper-clippy